As I mentioned yesterday, I'm not on a mission to change anyone else's habits (my Mum and Dad may not agree with this mind!), I'm doing this because it's important to me. I'm fortunate enough that I have the time and resources to try out new things. I also only have me to inconvenience. Being single and child-free is a definite bonus here (one of many!). If I want to spend the time going to 17 different shops to buy my groceries I can. If I want to spend a lot more money doing so, it's only my budget that's affected. But I realise this isn't the case for everyone. It's definitely costing me more money to live this way and although I am noticing that prices for non-plastic wrapped food are falling, they're still not as cheap as their plastic wrapped cousins. It is also less convenient having to go to multiple places to buy your shopping, and for time-poor people the convenience will outweigh the damage every time. I get that. Yesterday I got really upset at the woman in front of me in Sainsbury's who not only bought carrier bags in the shop, when she decided she didn't want to buy any more, had taken a wadge of the pointless thin bags they give you for the fruit and vegetables and took her mainly plastic wrapped purchases and put them in those. Many of those. It seems incredibly irresponsible to me. But I don't know her reasons behind it, so whilst I can be upset about it, it's not my place to judge. Just to clarify - I got upset internally, not actually at her!
This leads me on to my single use plastic purchases yesterday. I bought milk, squash and yeast, all or parts of which are packaged in single use plastic. And I wanted to explain my rationale behind the purchases.
Milk
I have my parents coming to stay for a few days this week. They're doing really well in improving their environmental footprint. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?! But we do like a nice cup of tea. With milk. I'm generally a soy milk drinker. Dad's trying out a whole range of non-dairy milk in his porridge in a morning; but none of these options taste as good in a cuppa as cow juice in my mind. It's tricky, because it's not clear on the units where I take my recycling if they take tetra paks. I put them in the bins but I could be actually doing harm (and yes I've looked for contact details so that I could call to find out before you say anything...). They do take plastic milk cartons and Lush will recycle the lids for free so I save those. I don't know that it actually gets recycled, but I have tied myself up in knots figuring out if non-recycled tetrapaks are better or worse than recyclable milk cartons and I can't decide. I also don't know if the carbon footprint of the milk (which is really high) in a recyclable bottle is worse than the lower carbon footprint of the contents of the non-recyclable tetrapak. And so because I was actually getting very troubled by all of this, in quite a bad way, I decided I had to make a call one way or the other and I decided to go with the dairy milk in a recyclable bottle. I'm using it in the tea for sure, but I've also used it to make crumpets which means I don't have to buy any in plastic wrapping, I'm using it to make a vegetarian polenta dish which is one of the many vegetarian dishes my parents will be eating this week (I rarely cook meat at home) and then I'm going to figure out another option so I don't have to keep doing it. My supermarket don't sell milk in glass bottles and I live in a managed block of flats so getting from the milkman isn't an option. We'll see. If anyone has any ideas please leave a comment.
Squash
When I started writing the section below, it's the first time I've ever done the maths to go with this and I think I'm going to need to change a habit here...
I am in love with Robinson's pink grapefruit squash. The recommendation is that it is diluted 1:4 with water. Yesterday I measured out how much I put into my pint glass for the strength I like it. It was 30mls in roughly 520mls water; approximately a 1:17 dilution. Yep, I like it weak, like Sunday School squash. So a 1 litre bottle makes around 30-35 pints for me. It means I buy a bottle roughly once every 6 weeks or so. Yesterday I looked at the cordials that come in glass bottles. There looked like there were really interesting flavours that could be a good alternative. The issue I had though is that they are also a generally 1:4 dilution and I'm not sure if they'll extend to a 1:17 dilution plus they also have an expiry of around 3-4 weeks. They are mostly in 500ml sizes so at half the volume of Robinson's, if they did go to 1:17 dilution, or even a 1:15 dilution I'd need one around every 3 weeks which puts them in the same ball park for the time to re-buy. So maybe I should have bought the cordial. Doing the maths has been a light bulb moment for me. I will remember for next time my beloved pink grapefruit runs out. And if at worst I can only go to a 1:10 dilution then maybe I just need to drink more water. Or buy it when on offer because those babies are definitely more expensive.
Yeast
Since I came back to London I have only bought a couple of loaves of speciality bread (they were ciabattas, sadly in plastic wrapping). Every other piece of bread has been made by my own fair hand. Generally the ingredients are flour, yeast, olive oil or butter, salt and water and variations thereof. The flour, olive oil and water come in either recyclable packaging or out of the tap. The butter and salt are in tubs that are either recyclable or which I will be getting refilled the next time I run out. Even if I say I only eat a loaf a month, that's at least 10 plastic bread bags that haven't gone to land fill because of me. But that leaves the yeast. I buy a tin of yeast that lasts me around four months, so three plastic lids a year. They are recyclable. Which I know doesn't actually mean they're good, but I do feel like I can justify this when offset against the non-recyclable plastic that would have been generated if I bought plastic-wrapped loaves from the supermarket. And yes, I do know that I could go to a bakery and buy bread in a paper bag, but I don't know what is in that loaf, and I don't know what the packaging is that their ingredients come in, but I do know that for me, in four months, the only quantifiable piece of single use plastic associated with all the bread I eat is one 5cm plastic lid, and I'm OK with that.
So these were the reasons for my purchases. I'm delighted that in writing them down, for the first, it's made me realise that I need to think about changing what I consume, for the last I feel fully justified in the purchase and for the second, I see an ingrained habit changing. This was an interesting exercise!!
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